Exits: Stalled out, in action

Karma as action, by definition, and the Grizzlies actions, catching up to them.

At some point, karma got turned around. Action became conclusion, to cosmic retribution. The word and its meaning stopped doing what it was supposed to do, which was move forward. We made it ends, not means.

Derived from the Sanskrit word karman, meaning ‘act’, karma means ‘action’ — that’s it. Where it got Westernized, like with most things, is where we started wanting it to serve us. Where action alone — imagine? — seemed too passive. Even in Hinduism, with its three distinct kinds of karma belonging to or affecting a person, the onus is metaphysical. Karma, action, is accumulative, to the point where it could take lifetimes to shift or to “catch up”. The action of it proves more like laws of motion. Westernized, karma is weaponized. Eye for an eye (hello, Old Testament) on speed dial, as if it could be directed, and often cloying.

In action, any action, there is going to be a catching up. The best physical proof of this comes in water, where force makes ripples and depending on the size of the two bodies involved (the source of force and the pool of water, oceans included) the ripples eventually ricochet back to first point of impact.

In life, action may just be time and its impact on you physically, mentally, deceptively, luckily. Whether it turns back around to trip you up or you find yourself straining to chase it. Sooner or later, we all start to feel it.

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Can you talk about this year’s Memphis Grizzlies without mentioning Ja Morant or Dillon Brooks? Absolutely. But you can’t talk about the problems the team collapsed on without acknowledging that those two, maybe unknowingly in the grand scheme but aware in their now infamous moments, came to represent two points of separate action that caught up hard and came to swamp Memphis completely.

Brooks, in his bad guy myth-building, shot from anywhere all season and saw his stats precipitously tank. He didn’t care, he said. His teammates didn’t care, he also said, it didn’t matter. Brooks played 41 more games this season than last and his field-goal percentage went from .432 to .396, his attempted 3-points per game from 4.7 to 6.0, and within that, his made 3-points per game barely budging — 1.4 to 2.0

At the end of this season, when the Grizzlies fell out, the report came loud and clear that Memphis was done with Brooks. The language was exacting, in itself an anomaly for reports like it. Brooks would “not be brought back under any circumstances”. Turns out, it did matter very much that all that action amounted to nothing on the floor.

What couldn’t have been anticipated was the sudden tinge of pity for Brooks, a wanton, sneering, self-made heel all season, suddenly facing his due. It’s fine if you felt it, I did too. Brooks had gone above and beyond to dare the basketball universe to call his bluff. Calling LeBron James old, making those weird faces all season, showing up in the tunnel pregame with just an open parachuter’s vest on over cutoffs, sitting gloweringly in all his postgames reiterating: he didn’t care.

Action never goes into the void — as Brooks acted like it was — but rarely does it rear back and deliver so immediately, snappingly elastic. It was hard not to wince, you could practically feel the sting.

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(I’ll preface this with a hearty “no shit” and/or ”who is” but) I’m no good at being sick. The bodily stuff, as a frequent migraine sufferer I might be better equipped for pain or unpleasant physical effects (not as in tough guy, more the result of frequency). It’s the down and outness of sickness I can’t handle. Being made to lay low.

Some of this is probably latent Capitalism, some is growing up with a self-employed dad who grew up the eldest son of an early widowed Eastern European single mother, some is occupational as a full-time freelancer (which goes back to the first two in terms of prototypes, I’m sure). The guilt I feel at being made to rest, at losing time, can come across like its own symptom.

I was sick all this week with a summer cold, a qualifier that sounds almost quaint, like I broke out the sandals for it, instead of identical bedridden days of congestion so intense my sinuses felt like they were exploding, a cough that couldn’t keep up with clearing it all and then all of a sudden, on day three, a fever like holiday fireworks. The city was blanketed in smoke from Quebec’s wildfires so each day the light stayed steady in a squinting ochre matte, unshifting, no sense of transition between morning, afternoon and evening. Which, while depressingly grim, helped. I watched a lot of movies. I wandered to the kitchen for water. I moved from bed to couch then back to bed so going to sleep would feel different.

I knew I turned a corner when I felt the familiar welling up of pent in efficiency raring to multitask. I followed up, I showered, I picked up dry cleaning and library holds. I did an interview that went comfortably long because it felt so nice, so novel, to be having a conversation again. In this mode I’m almost manic, with dozens of ideas and inclinations all geared toward making up for lost time. Action like a frequency, like starting the car in the middle of a really good song on the radio and turning it up. The lesson each time this happens is that action didn’t leave me, only narrowed, quieted, necessarily slowed. The lesson always lost in the relief of action again, full volume.

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I’ve started to watch Captain more. He’s 10 now, going on 11, and he hasn’t slowed so much as become a more concentrated version of himself. Stubborn, very considering, a deep chiller, still pretty cheeky though particular in his jokes, independent and at once a giant baby, he moves through the world on his own time. Cap can’t be rushed and when he is, he’s indignant.

I found him through a rescue north of Toronto in the weeks I knew I was going to quit Vice. When we drove to meet him he was coy, leading then trailing us on a walk, watching us and seemingly deciding for himself. I quit, had my last day and went and picked up Captain the day after. I felt very sure of what I was doing, what I wanted next, and Captain has mirrored that feeling in the nine years he’s been with us, no matter how many times it’s turned over or wavered for me. He very much exists on his own terms.

I watch him more because while I don’t want to acknowledge it, I know there’s less time now. On walks he sometimes acts like he forgets we’re there, putting his nose down and ploughing around, but then, with no prompt, he’ll turn and look up at me in a way that’s too sustained for a dog, kind of smirking but levelling in the specific choice and intensity of his attention, like all the years are compiling into one look between us. He still has the tendency to disappoint strangers who meet him and want his attention, turning away in a polite gesture of moving on, but seeks out people having a hard time, older folks and people in distress we pass on walks, people he remembers and quietly moves to. He’s started to stubbornly stop if he gets tugged past something he wants to check out too many times, refusing to move and wrestling his head around to slip his collar, for a second his face and neck bunched grotesquely with three double chins and then suddenly free and naked and wild. He still eats so much garbage, never forgets the places he found and ate something disgusting. He’ll chill on his own for most of the day, flat on his side and impervious, then suddenly roll to his back on one of many times we pass him, exposing his belly and smacking us with a paw if we stop scratching his chest. He’ll come out of a shake, stretch or a sneeze with a sudden burst of manic energy, mouth open in a weird grin. He gets fidgety, pacing from room to room, sitting and boring his blue eyes into us if we’re not winding down to bed by 10pm.

His actions haven’t changed, only deepened. Watching him can be this joyful and crushing realization that dogs hold time. You pour it into them. Your time imposed on theirs, their time accelerated by yours. They wear it, reflect it, carry it, happily; your every action impacts them but they exist outside any karmic bounds — whatever your preferred definition. They have no idea it’s catching up and you can’t escape the knowledge that it is.

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With Morant, it wasn’t that the action was private, only that it escaped the bounds of our ready, in-game attention, but like Brooks, it caught up all the same. Writing this, we’re hanging in the swell of action coming back around. Adam Silver’s said there’s more to come on the decisions the league has made about what discipline Morant is going to face, but he doesn’t want to disrupt the Finals. The action of the Finals.

Silver is someone who understands how little ripples can turn into big swells, capable of capsizing a business.

While I do think the NBA trotting Morant out for itself was callous and obvious, it now appears it was premature. Which is more proof to never use contrition as a stunt as it is that action and consequence cannot be bound season-to-season.

The Grizzlies are in the discomfort of that now, weighed down by their star while the rest of the roster remains better than functional and perfectly endearing, stalled out — or stalling — despite all the action. Desmond Bane, Jaren Jackson Jr., Steven Adams, Brandon Clarke, Xavier Tillman, this is a group struggling to get out from the riptide of two actions converging and get on with the very straightforward and fundamental actions of basketball. Just basketball.

And how was the basketball? Pretty bad in those six games against the Lakers. Morant moved alone, nobody talked, Bane Hail-Maryed himself downhill into multiple planted defenders again and again just to try and make something shift, Brooks looked like he didn’t want to be there and a fundamentally explosive group of initiators lagged and chased.

If there is fault within the franchise then it falls on the front office, who, while not solely responsible for Brooks or Morant, still watched their activities, the things they were doing, build up and thought perhaps they would pass. Like a bout of turbulence they could manoeuvre the team through. With Brooks, maybe they were waiting to ride that bluster out, but with Morant, disorder quickly became instability, and was already, in several documented instances, conflict. It was dangerous, for everybody, to go on as if action they’d neglected to initially acknowledge wouldn’t come to bear in a way that made foolish the leading logic of “none of our business”.

That isn’t karma, it’s just catching up.